I, A Football Fan, Boycott FIFA In Qatar After My ‘Migrant’ Worker Uncle’s Death

I chose not to watch World Cup this year played in stadiums, many people died constructing. My uncle is one of them.

Image: Vibhushita Singh/ The Quint

In my native country Nepal, as in other places of the world, Football is a religion. I love the game and want Messi to win. This year, however, the joy I once found in one of the greatest sports ever in mankinfd, is haunted by the ghosts of an untold number of voiceless workers. 

These deaths became personal to me after my uncle died of a ‘cardiac arrest’ while working as an unskilled labourer in Qatar. 

While I know my personal boycott doesn’t mean much, I can only hope that my story and reasoning will provide some perspective to those who are wondering why there is so much controversy around FIFA. 

In 2022, was there really a need for the World Cup to rely on egregiously unsafe bonded labour? By placing profit over justice and decency, FIFA has undermined the positive values that give football its global appeal.

How Football Fever Gripped Us Growing in Indian Subcontinent..

Growing up in a remote part of western Nepal, my friends and I were obsessed with football. There’s no space for a football field in our village, perched atop stacks of terraced fields that tumble down steep hillsides but we played improvised barefoot games in vacant rice paddies after school, as we chased a deflated volleyball while modelling ourselves after our favourite international stars.

My hero was the Brazilian legend, Ronaldo. I was twelve when the 2002 World Cup which we watched on a tiny colour television, pretty much brought the country to a standstill. 

As we grew up, the pressures of life in an impoverished nation began to set in. By a stroke of luck, my father— a high school teacher in the village, won a visa lottery to the United States. I moved there with my family when I was thirteen.

When I was in medical college in Texas, most of my childhood friends were looking for jobs as menial labourers abroad. Nepal’s economy had stagnated after a decade-long civil war and endemic corruption.

With employment hard to find, the Persian Gulf countries tempted Nepali workers with jobs that required long hours in the heat, in exchange for a few hundred dollars a month—a meaningful amount to send home. Others like my uncle or 'mama', Pitamber Bhattarai took less well-paying work in neighbouring India as domestic help or agricultural hands. 

How South Asia's Labour Export Ravages Families 

I met Mama after years in 2010 while on an education trip to Delhi. He was working at a restaurant, and had travelled hours to reach me. We met at a sweet shop because he wanted me to try the famous sweets of Delhi. We spent hours reminiscing about my late mother—his older sister whom we both missed dearly. I was seven when an unknown illness claimed her life. The hope of preventing such tragedy from befalling others is what drove me to become a doctor. 

During those hours with him, I felt like I could touch base with my mother's moving memories. As we parted, I learned that Mama who was the sole provider for his wife, his mother, and three young children back home, was getting a better-paying job in Qatar. I congratulated him on the opportunity. 

Two years later, to my utter shock, I learned that my mama had died of a ‘cardiac arrest’ while working in Qatar. The family had no idea of his whereabouts or workplace and that his body was being repatriated for the final rites. I was shaken to the core as the tragedy of death in family hit me all over again, even if, his passing away made no sense to me. He was young, healthy, and full of life. 

The death certificate from Qatar listed only ‘cardiac arrest’ as the cause of demise. Even as a medical student, I knew that cardiac arrest couldn't be a cause of death, but rather the end itself. Despite all our efforts, we got no closure.

In 2013, a powerful report in The Guardian revealed the inhumane working conditions faced by migrant workers in Qatar. I wondered if my uncle had met with a similar fate.

In the following months and years, I began to seek out stories from Nepali workers in Qatar. All shared similar tales of inhumane treatment. I read reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International detailing the atrocities faced by migrant workers, including the Kafala system that permitted employers to seize workers’ passports, thus, effectively reducing them to bonded labourers. 

The Silent Graveyards Around FIFA Stadiums

I learned, too, that on an average, the Gulf countries send half a dozen coffins a week to Nepal with the remains of somebody’s kin. This didn’t just apply to Nepal — workers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and African countries faced similar.  

Concerns about workers' rights and safety, and local communities arose in previous World Cups too when FIFA stadiums were being built in Brazil, Beijing and South Africa. 

As a practising physician now, I travel to Nepal frequently to conduct global health work in emergency care. On a recent flight from Kathmandu to Qatar, I sat next to a 27-year-old man from a remote village in eastern Nepal. 

Nervous and excited, he shared how, through connections from relatives working in Qatar, he found an agent in Nepal who arranged a two-year contract for him at a company called Ipas. They would pay him 275 dollars a month plus an 82-dollar food stipend. He had already paid the agent nearly 1,500 dollars to secure the job — more than his four months’ salary. He would start as a paint scraper in this new role, with 8-hour-day shifts and a day off every week. 

The airplane, one of four daily flights from Kathmandu to Qatar, was full of men like him. So many of such men have died building infrastructure for the Qatar World Cup that even accurate statistics are impossible to find. Some estimates say, the number could well exceed 6,500. Each of those dead workers leave behind a bereft, destitute family, now with fewer options for survival than before. 

FIFA’s Humongous Human Cost

Meanwhile, FIFA is estimated to earn nearly six billion dollars from the World Cup this year. 

The Qatar experience has affected my family personally, but the issue of FIFA ignoring human rights violations is not new. The football body must be held accountable.

When the world learned in 2010 that Qatar had won the FIFA hosting bid, many questioned how a country with only three stadiums would host the biggest global sporting event. It was the blood, sweat and very lives of migrant workers that made this event possible.

Contractors yanked desperate workers from poverty in South Asia and Africa and flew them in, took their passports, and put them to work. So what if a few died? There would always be others desperate to provide for their families. In fact, young men have sought employment in Qatar even after receiving their own relatives’ dead bodies, or seeing relatives return due to chronic illness caused by the heat and poor working conditions.  

Nepalis are quick to blame their own government and the economic instability that has long affected millions. The government must be held accountable for allowing numerous workers to be exploited by overseas worksites and for not adequately advocating for the rights of its citizens abroad. 

But so do the employers in Qatar and FIFA, especially for the indignities and injustices suffered by the workers who built the infrastructure for the World Cup in Qatar.

The bottom line is that while what FIFA thrives on breaks families of the dead. That is unacceptable. 

I chose not to watch the World Cup this year because cheering on games being played in buildings that so many of my people died constructing would feel like I’ve cheated them. And also because memories of my uncle no longer allow me to.

(An Assistant Professor at Brown University, Dr Ramu Kharel is an emergency medicine specialist focusing on public health, tropical diseases, and improving emergency care in rural settings. He loves basketball and Urdu poetry and tweets at @erdockharel. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)